Dear colleagues,
Many of you have heard of the precipitous decision of Incyte Genomics to
immediately cease all genome support services as of October 25.
Effectively, Incyte pulled the plug on all of the services it acquired
with the acquistion of GenomeSystems.
There was no advance warning of this move, not to the employees in St.
Louis and not to researchers who relied on Incyte to distribute clones
and DNA arrayed from libraries.
What we can tell you is that the Chlamy BAC library is safe here at
Minnesota, and also in the DOE sequencing laboratories. We are
negotiating with the
skeleton staff remaining in St. Louis to obtain their copies of the
library and any filters they may have spotted. We are also negotiating
with Incyte's former competitors to find a new distributor for clones
and filter arrays. Although this will take some time, we are confident we
will recover the ability to distribute clones and filters.
For the short term, the filters you have in hand should be usable for a
long time. We have seen very little loss of signal even after 25 uses.
As for obtaining the clones, we are looking at ways to distribute them
from Minnesota, and we hope to be able to give you the details soon.
Pete Lefebvre and Carolyn Silflow
University of Minnesota
